unetbootin doesn't error out when out of disk space

[Greg]

I was trying to write Backtrack Linux 4R2 iso to my 2GB thumb drive. The md5sum matched so I know the iso is good. When I tried booting from the thumb drive the kernel kept refusing to boot. I tried 4 different machines and it always crashed at the same spot. I traced the problem to a bad filesystem.squashfs. It turns out that the drive was full but unetbootin didn't report any problems. It said it successfully completed the process of installing all of the files on the thumb drive.

I was using version 494 on Windows XP SP3.

[Arpad Kovacs (minhmeoke)]

Confirmed, we should check how much free space is available on the drive before starting an installation, and compare it to the .iso/.img size. Unfortunately, we do not have any way to know in advance how much space a distribution will require before downloading it; in this case it would still fail silently. However, we could add this as an option for installing from local disk images, where we already know the size of the image before installation.

[Mihai Dumitru (mihair-dumitru)]

This definitely affects me also. I am using unetbootin on a regular basis to write an ISO built with SUSE Studio as a Live CD to an USB Stick and if I forget to format the USB Stick before, then sometimes there is no space left but unetbootin does not complain. My ISO is about 4GB big and some files stay the same between different versions while some files do change. Anyway in my case there should be no problem in calculating the size needed to write the ISO to the USB Stick as my ISO is local, so no need to download anything extra of an unknown size.

[Dan Dascalescu (ddascalescu+launchpad)]

Please implement this simple check for available disk space at least for local ISO files. Another scenario where it's necessary is because of sizes being quoted in MB vs. MiB - if I create a 1GB USB stick partition but the ISO needs 1024MiB, I might think I'm okay, but actually the image writing will run out of space.

BTW, is this a duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/1012372 ?

PS: this looks like a really basic and simple issue to fix.

[Mihai Dumitru (mihair-dumitru)]

If checking in advance for how much space is free on the USB Drive is too complicated and depends on which type of data needs to be written, then maybe simply checking if the writting of files/data was successful and giving an appropriate error code at the end will also suffice. The User is then notified that the writting was not complete but at least he knows that the USB Stick may not be usable.

[Aapo Rantalainen (aapo-rantalainen)]

Seems this is fixed (at least in trusty). I intentionally made too small partition in usb-stick and then selected local ISO. I got proper

"The directory %1 is out of space. Press 'Yes' to abort installation, 'No' to ignore this error and attempt to continue installation, and 'No to All' to ignore all out-of-space errors."